The Justin Trudeau parade may be unstoppable, but recent Canadian history is littered with such parades that went wildly off course or crashed.

Liberal MP Justin Trudeau holds his son Xavier and his wife Sophie Gregoire holds their daughter Ella-Grace after announcing he will seek the leadership of the party Tuesday, October 2, 2012 in Montreal.

OTTAWA—It’s rarely a smart move to fling yourself in front of a parade.

You could get crushed by a float.

But as the Justin Trudeau bandwagon pulled out of the station Tuesday night, those straining to jump on board should at least look at the recent history of political coronations, both here and south of the border.

This is not to compare Trudeau to either a footnote (Audrey McLaughlin) or a world leader seeking a second term (Barack Obama) but there are obvious lessons sprinkled along the landscape over the years.

We can start in 1989 when Trudeau was but a 17-year-old and New Democrats needed to replace a long-time leader, Ed Broadbent.

Out of nowhere, a consensus sprung up that a northern woman, the heretofore unknown rookie MP McLaughlin, fit the demographics the party needed to grow.

She fended off a charge from the unilingual west coast challenger, Dave Barrett, but the best Barrett could do was expose McLaughlin’s many flaws.

The same show played out four years later when a perceived laying-on of hands by Brian Mulroney all but handed the keys to 24 Sussex to Kim Campbell, scaring off all pretenders except for a young cabinet colleague, Jean Charest.

Like Barrett, Charest’s candidacy exposed the winner’s warts and Campbell quite quickly led the once-proud Progressive Conservatives to the sidelines with McLaughlin’s NDP, neither achieving official party status in the transformative 1993 election.

Had McLaughlin and Campbell not been given such putative, early, pushes to leadership, history may have unfolded quite differently, with Barrett protecting NDP interests in the west and Charest showcasing his obvious political skills in Ontario and Quebec.

Paul Martin, the Liberal leader in exile, was similarly unstoppable and largely unchallenged a decade later when his time to lead the party finally arrived.

After reducing a Liberal majority to a minority, the party’s slide accelerated under Martin when he was defeated by Stephen Harper in 2006.

When Michael Ignatieff was deemed The Next One after the 2008 election, he did not even have to face another leadership campaign after his failed 2006 bid.

He went one-and-out, leading the Liberals to their worst showing in history, consigning it to third place and losing his own seat.

More recently, Obama created the greatest political buzz of a generation or more when he signalled his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination.

However, would he have emerged as the tough, polished campaigner he became had he not been so severely tested by Hillary Clinton in a gruelling series of debates, primaries and caucuses?

At home, NDP leader Tom Mulcair survived a rigorous series of debates, overtaking the man thought to be the anointed one, Brian Topp, and a surging campaign of British Columbia MP Nathan Cullen.

Harper needed to win two leadership races in order to become leader of the Conservative party.

It is not Trudeau’s fault that no one looms to force him to forge his leadership bona fides under fire.

But the Liberal party could be the loser if there is not someone in the race to push Trudeau — not a confederate to make him a better debater or challenge him to flesh out policy, but someone who could be seen as a real challenger, someone who could beat him.

That candidate, of course, is Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney, a man who could bring unparalleled economic gravitas to a party in need of some policy heft, but a man whose leadership ambitions are thus far defined by anonymous Liberal whispers and aspirational Facebook campaigns.

Carney has given no indication he would leave his perch with two years left for the leadership of Canada’s third party. He is in the upper echelons of the global economic stratosphere, and a Liberal leadership bid would be a painful, earthbound re-entry.

But there are senior Liberals who have not yet taken “no” for an answer — because they haven’t been given “no” for an answer.

When he was asked directly about his political plans by Global TV’s West Block host Tom Clark last spring, Carney gave a political answer, parrying the host’s contention that he hadn’t closed down a political future with the cryptic, “I haven’t opened it up.’’

Trudeau may prove to be the real deal and none of this will matter.

But there are almost seven months left until the party chooses a new leader and if Trudeau stumbles while leading his parade, some Liberals will keep dreaming of Carney until the Bank of Canada governor delivers that definitive “no.”

Tim Harper is a national affairs writer. His column appears Monday, Wednesday and Friday. tharper@thestar.ca

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